Malkovich Shines In `Of Mice And Men'

October 16, 1992|By MALCOLM JOHNSON; Courant Film Critic

His mouth gaping open, his eyes squinting and blinking uncomprehendingly, his big hulk shifting with clumsy strength, John Malkovich breathes new life into John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," after all its years on high school English curriculums.

His performance, perhaps his most finely detailed and emotionally engaging work on film since his big-screen debut in "Places in the Heart," towers over the film directed by his longtime Steppenwolf Theatre partner Gary Sinise.

Even though the wrenching ending of this tale of two migrant workers looms as inevitably over the story as the catharsis of any Greek tragedy, Malkovich fills us with false hope that somehow Lenny Small will escape his fate -- as Romeo and Juliet did in Victorian Shakespeare.

Sinise, who also plays Lenny's partner George Milton, makes every effort to stave off any feeling of fatalism in "Of Mice and Men." He fills the screen with sunny vistas of the bountiful California countryside, with its winding narrow roads, pristine green brooks and waving yellow wheat fields. He shows men at work, reaping and threshing and hefting grain bags, and men at play, playing cards in the bunkhouse or flinging horseshoes. Yet these scenes of male western life only prolong a story that gains little from airing out.

While the original 1939 Lewis Milestone black-and-white version is only three minutes shorter, it feels tauter, and somehow more real. And while Steinbeck's devotion for Salinas Valley almost cries out for color, the feeling of the Depression is black and white and gray -- in part because of John Ford's film of "Grapes of Wrath," in part because of the photographs of artists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Sinise begins and ends his film in darkness, with the rattle of freights and glints of light into a boxcar at night. The scenes in the bunkhouse of the ranch where George and Lenny also find their dreams, and in the barn where the final nightmare begins, also are dim. But the pervasive feeling of the film is lustrous and golden. At times, Kenneth MacMillan's photography almost imparts the

feeling of a commercial for the Gap or L. L. Bean (the working clothes have a newly bought and lightly bleached look), a feeling reinforced by Mark Ishams too modern score.

Still, in a time when most moviegoers (and video viewers) seem to prefer color, "Of Mice and Men" retells Steinbeck's tale with sensitivity and respect. While Sinise has a tendency to draw out an incident such as the shooting of old Candy's mangy dog, his first-rate cast sustains curiosity about a preordained tale.

Malkovich obviously is the core of the action, just as Lon Chaney Jr. was in the original. One of the great aspects of his performance is that he can make Lenny a odd curiosity without even making him ridiculous or laughable, though there are times when his sideward glances afford a chuckle or two, just because Lenny thinks he is being sly.

Sinise's George seems too boyish and casually well-groomed in a performance that amounts to a reprise of his performance as Tom Joad in Steppenwolf's "The Grapes of Wrath." Yet his playing of a humane, bright wanderer who can't quite figure out why he puts up with Lenny works more convincingly than that of Burgess Meredith, who comes across as a slumming intellectual in the original. Sherilyn Fenn also ups the authenticity level over Betty Field as Curley's unhappy, pretty, dreamy and slightly vacant wife.

Sinise draws a surprisingly affecting performance from Ray Walston, the old diabolical old musical comedy man, as old Candy, whose lost hopes are reborn through the promise of joining with George and Lenny in their plans for a little ranch of their own. And lest Steinbeck's vision of humankind seem too positive, Casey Siemaszko swaggers in as the boss's son to show the soul-destroying effects of ownership and power over the lives of other men. Bravely, Joe Morton contributes a brief but finely divided portrait of a bitter, even cruel black outcast. Yet his stooped back, like Walston's ruined hand or stump, show that Sinise's producing abilities do not lie in disfigurements or prosthetics.

Rated PG-13, this film contains Stienbeck's own references to Shorty's saving of one tender hand for his wife and several unnerving moments, including the crushing of the little bully's hand by mighty Lenny.

Film review

OF MICE AND MEN, directed by Gary Sinise; screenplay by Horton Foote, based on the novel by John Steinbeck; director of photography, Kenneth MacMillan; music composed by Mark Isham; production designer, David Gropman; edited by Robert L. Sinise; produced by Russ Smith and Gary Sinise; executive producer, Alan C. Blomquist. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release, opening today at Showcase Cinemas, East Hartford. Running time: 110 minutes.